| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery: this waif of the world into her model little girl of demure manners
and prim deportment. Neither would she have believed that she really
liked Anne much better as she was.
Anne went to bed that night speechless with misery because
Matthew had said the wind was round northeast and he feared it
would be a rainy day tomorrow. The rustle of the poplar leaves
about the house worried her, it sounded so like pattering
raindrops, and the full, faraway roar of the gulf, to which she
listened delightedly at other times, loving its strange,
sonorous, haunting rhythm, now seemed like a prophecy of storm
and disaster to a small maiden who particularly wanted a fine
Anne of Green Gables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Princess of Parms by Edgar Rice Burroughs: upon me, not ten feet from my breast, was the point of that
huge spear, a spear forty feet long, tipped with gleaming
metal, and held low at the side of a mounted replica of the
little devils I had been watching.
But how puny and harmless they now looked beside this
huge and terrific incarnation of hate, of vengeance and of
death. The man himself, for such I may call him, was fully
fifteen feet in height and, on Earth, would have weighed some
four hundred pounds. He sat his mount as we sit a horse,
grasping the animal's barrel with his lower limbs, while the
hands of his two right arms held his immense spear low at the
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm: the princesses promising to come again the next night.
When they came to the stairs, the soldier ran on before the
princesses, and laid himself down; and as the twelve sisters slowly
came up very much tired, they heard him snoring in his bed; so they
said, 'Now all is quite safe'; then they undressed themselves, put
away their fine clothes, pulled off their shoes, and went to bed. In
the morning the soldier said nothing about what had happened, but
determined to see more of this strange adventure, and went again the
second and third night; and every thing happened just as before; the
princesses danced each time till their shoes were worn to pieces, and
then returned home. However, on the third night the soldier carried
Grimm's Fairy Tales |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: To be caught by Death."
But out of the night I heard,
Like the inland sound of the sea,
The hushed and terrible sob
Of all humanity.
Then I said, "Oh who am I
To scorn God to his face?
I will bow my head and stay
And suffer with my race."
GIFTS
I GAVE my first love laughter,
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